


[to forget this/ dream within a dream/]

by PassionsPromise



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-05
Updated: 2015-06-07
Packaged: 2018-03-29 05:30:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3884212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PassionsPromise/pseuds/PassionsPromise
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“It is no doubt that we forget dreams more and more as time passes after waking”<br/>Sigmund Freud, “The Forgetting of Dreams”.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The Civil Wars: Disarm.<br/>Bon Iver: Holocene.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>It only appears as if Wanda and Pietro are destined to see each other in dreams and glass: their destinies spiral toward each other and yet they can never get close enough to touch.</p>
<p>Multiple universes, multiple fantasies. </p>
<p>Only one in which they are both real.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. This World (Without You).

**Author's Note:**

> This might be a little confusing: I've tried very hard to make it a little easier to understand, but if anyone has any questions, please drop a line, even if it is just simply to give out about it ^^.

Wanda knows this isn’t real.

The boy in front of her is framed by pearl-white air. They both are. But that isn’t the point. She knows this boy, this boy who is the same age as her, this boy with the same tilt of the head, the same pale face, the same veins that bleed under his skin. They are the same, made the exact same way. She steps even closer, wanting to etch her fingers over his chest, just to see if they follow the same beat- one stopping at the same time the other starts.

Wanda knows this isn’t real.

She _knows_ this boy. But she’s never met him. Not here.

It doesn’t scare her, the thought of it. Actually, she feels like she’s come home for the first time in all her fourteen years. She knows the patterns of his heartbeat in the same way she understands the movements of his body.

He is a breathing design she understands.

Wanda knows this isn’t real.

And it breaks her heart.

_“I want to know you better,”_ she wants to say. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t need to. He smiles, and it’s as heart-wrenching as her thoughts and she _knows_ , knows with every fibre of her being, that this boy has read her mind before she even thought to think.

What completely shatters her is that she knows that when she wakes up, she won’t remember him, only the ache that she’s missing something more important than breathing; a half of a whole she never knew existed.

It is only outside of her, outside of this, that the tears come.

They come, and she doesn’t know why.

She never, ever let this boy see her heart break from the outside.

She wants to keep it that way.

 

 

 

 

 

Ever since Pietro was a little boy he saw a girl’s eyes stare back at him in the cracks of glass his father broke over the kitchen table while his mother screamed frantically at her little boy to run away.

Eventually, Pietro had the guts to leave the house and never return.

He saw stars and tracked moons and sometimes, if he looked closely, he could see that same girl in the reflections he left behind him in his travels.

She was from another world, he knew. This girl had a rawness to her he couldn’t explain, and now, in his eighteenth year, he longed more than ever to understand her.

He loved her, but it was not the type of love people craved during the deep winter’s cold: this love was something deeper, probably darker, maybe stronger, even, than a lover’s love.

If definitely wasn’t sexual, but the brutality of her made him want to twine himself closer to her, as if his gentler cockiness craved something more vivid, more intense.

He knew it had something to do with her power to ground him in a split second when all he longed for was the skies and the wind in his hair.

 

 

 

 

 

Even now, as he stares deeply into the pools of rainwater at his feet, he can see her, and even though he knows she is not real, it doesn’t stop the longing for her to be _close._

_Just this once._

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Wanda!”

Wanda looks over her shoulder and grins at the graceful redhead that comes to walk alongside her. She can tell by the ballet shoes she slings over her shoulder that Natasha has a ballet recital. Then she thinks it is Tuesday, a snowy Tuesday, and the grey skies reflect the cracked glass underneath her skin.

“You aren’t yourself today. You’ve been blanking out in class,” Natasha says. Wanda shrugs. “Are you still feeling under the weather?”

For as long as Wanda’s known her, Natasha has always been a mother hen. This is not unusual: they’ve been friends since Natasha beat the living crap out of Tony on the first day of school.

It was only after, when Tony gave her back the photograph, that she completely forgave him.

“I feel lost,” Wanda murmurs, grappling with the straps of her bag. “Just lost.”

 

 

 

 

 

“Is it sunny where you are?” the boy asks as he holds her hand. Wanda shakes her head.

“No. Snowy. Always snow, and rain. Lots of rain, too.”

“That sounds right,” the boy answers, looking away from her and to the great, white beyond before them. Wanda tilts her head, slightly. It’s enough.

“You seem a very sad person,” the boy replies. “The weather makes me think that even more.”

“I’m only sad because you aren’t real,” she replies. He smiles into whiteness and she wakes up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Glass breaks. Pietro knows his fist has smashed into the wall before he even has the power to stop himself. The glass splinters on the ground at his feet.

He thinks he’s hurt her.

She doesn’t reappear for weeks after that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I’m afraid I’ll keep forgetting until I eventually remember.”

“I know. But you won’t. You always remember me.”

 

 

 

 

 

Pietro sat on the bus and waited for it to pull off. The entire thing reeked of cigarettes and metal, but it was a ticket to the next city, a ticket to finding the girl he saw in a dream not so long ago.

He could feel her sometimes, in the spaces where his heart caved whenever he realized she wasn’t by his side, and as he curled close to the cushions under him, getting ready for the overnight trip. He looked out the window, watched the darkness and the stars.

He closed his eyes.

He dreamt of her again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

On her sixteenth birthday, her parents buy her a silver chain with a single shoe on it. It reminds Wanda of a possibility she can’t remember ever wanting or feeling. She leaves it in its box, waiting for the moment when an older woman would be strong enough to wear it.

“You can’t keep on like this,” Natasha says. “If you do, you’ll break your heart.”

“It’s already dead,” Wanda whispers back, staring at that box with venom.

Natasha, she knows, has already guessed the truth; the empty statuette in her chest has stopped beating a long time ago, alongside the photograph of the two babies floating in black space without a name.

“Has someone said something?” Natasha says, reaching out and holding Wanda’s hand in two of her own. The walls of the bedroom they sit in bow closer together. Eavesdropping. Wanda doesn’t trust any of it.

“Vision said he wanted to give us a try,” Wanda offers instead, staring into empty space and wondering when her own eyes started staring back at her in the middle of the day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I think, in another world, we know each other even more than we do now,” the boy says as they walk through white, blank space. Wanda watches the world before her with vague eyes.

“I think so too,” she replies. “I think, in another world, you were as fast as the wind.”

(The shoe on the chain burns her memory).

“And you? If you had the power to control anything, what would it be?”

In Wanda’s mind she sees other worlds and a scarlet fever she cannot control.

They boy grins. “Sounds reckless. Beautiful, too,” he offers, twining his fingers closer, _closer_ , around hers. The warmth of his skin is a bliss she wishes she could remember.

In a world they both breathed in.

 

 

 

 

 

 

He isn’t there when she wakes up.

 

 

 

 

 

She cries until her heart drips out of a body she has no power to control.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Come on, Pietro. Come to bed.”

“I don’t want to. I have to go.” The bed sheets rustle. A smile ignites the darkness. Pietro can see the white gleam of her teeth.

“So you really are a wandering gypsy?” she says. Pietro walks out and slams the door behind him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“What are you thinking of taking up in college?”

“I don’t know.”

“But-“ Natasha frowns, stepping closer to her. Tony shifts between them both, wondering if he’s caught somewhere he shouldn’t be. The silence between them is breakable, though. He says-

“Wanda. Don’t you think you should be trying to figure out your own world before you try figuring out someone else’s?”

It catches Wanda completely off-guard: but it’s a little truth she understands.

Natasha turns and stares at Tony with wide eyes. Tony shrugs, silent.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wanda breathes between the cracks of her dreams. A part of her wonders if she can break either reality when the boy she knows so well inhabits one, and her friends the other.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It isn’t until her eighteenth year that someone says something. It is her mother who opens it all with the words, “Sweetheart, there’s something we need to tell you.”

“I know,” Wanda replies. “I’ve known it for a very long time.” She’s known it since her sixteenth birthday, in fact. She does not say this, though.

Her mother jumps in her seat, hands hovering over the top of the kitchen table. Her father looks to his wife. He knew his daughter would see it before they ever had the chance to explain.

They were twins, after all.

Wanda feels cut-off from everything she’s ever known.

“You’ve no idea how much it hurts,” Wanda says. “You’ve no idea how much it burns inside, knowing he isn’t here.”

She gets up, walks away.

That night, the bombs fall like shooting stars.

Tony is the one who gets her out of the rubble: she sees the colour red and thinks of another world, another time, another place, where a boy could run as fast as any light and she, the little girl dressed all in scarlet, could manipulate thoughts as if they were toys.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Her parents fell into a black hole during the bombing.

She is not sad over their deaths. She is numb.

At the funeral, she remembers the lone, nameless gravestone next to their lowering coffins.

She knows it’s his.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“Why did I need to? You already knew.”

Did she?

 

 

 

Maybe it was right there, all along, written in the pearl-white of a gravestone without a name.

 

 

 

 

Pietro finds a cemetery sometime in the middle of winter. He isn’t sure how old he was when he ran from his home, he isn’t sure what year it is, how long he’s been searching for a shadow that doesn’t exist. The whiteness, the simply purity of the place, calms his frustrated heart. His skin itches to run again. He doesn’t.

There’s something familiar about the place. As if he’s been there before.

He probably has.

He finds a lone gravestone next to the grave of a woman named Magda.

His mother’s name was Mary, wasn’t it?

He stares at the lone gravestone, and wondered when in this reality his twin had the time to die without ever telling him.

 

 

 

 

 

She decides to wear the chain after all. Natasha thinks it’s because she’s gotten over her grief (But it’s really because she believes her brother’s watching over her now). Wanda has no one now, not in this world. (But her brother’s still waits for her on the other side).

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tony’s family offer her a place to stay until someone decides to take her in. He acts like he isn’t sure how to deal with someone younger than him: he shuffles from one foot to the other in the doorway of her new bedroom.

“Are you okay?” he asks, scratching his head. She nods.

She knows he understands when he looks a little closer and sees a boy he never got the chance to meet.

“You remember what I said, back then?” he says. She nods. She is sure now.

It won’t stop until she is ready.

She is ready now.

Tony nods. “We’ll be waiting, on the other side, kid. He’s waiting, too.”

Tony disappears through the open door and she knows that the dream is cracking in all the right places.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wanda wonders how she could have missed it when it was there all along.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I want to do all those things.”

It’s the first thing she says when she opens her eyes. The white, blank space before them stretches out in all directions, and it’s dizzying.

_“-Don’t you think you should be trying to figure out your own world before you try figuring out someone else’s?”_

The boy smiles slightly: when she raises her hand and waves it, a world appears below their feet.

Their world.

Where they belong.

They are standing in space, looking down on the earth below. It’s beautiful, cold, and quiet, away from everyone and everything. She is at peace. The boy grins.

“Do you want to come with me, Wanda?” he says. “To another world?”

She opens her mouth.

 

 

 

 

“Yes.”

 

 

 

 

The dream snaps then. Reality re-configures itself.

She opens her eyes.


	2. A World (With You)

Wanda opens her eyes and knows everything in this world is not as real as she wants it to be.

This time, she remembers him.

The dreams- She remembers the dreams.

Her fingers reach outward and grasp reality. But it’s a fading reality.

She’s still here, she discovers; still stuck in the bedroom Tony left her in. 

It’s a cage.

Quietly, she takes in the walls, and realizes something that’s never dawned on her before: her cage is the same room where the bombs fell and swallowed her parents up and almost took them both- her and Pietro. This was the same room they faced STARK and sealed their fate. It’s a slow, dawning realization, not one that overtakes her in the space of a moment. She sees the photos hanging on the walls, the dolls and the runners lumped together, as if a pair of children forgot where one of them began and the other ended.

She remembers the days when Pietro forgot to keep his shoes clean, keep his voice down, keep himself in a tight little corner while their mother waited for their father to come home from work. The lazy days are what she remembers the most: the days when they played quietly in a corner of their home, the days when he didn’t feel too childish to play with his sister and her dolls and the little house their father made for them. The dollhouse sits, neglected, to the right of the bed.

“I want to go home,” she breathes, thinking of Pietro. Pietro, whose name fits in all the places she belongs. “I want to wake up. Please, let me wake up.”

The room doesn’t answer her.

She hears the steady quietness all around her.

_“And you? If you had the power to control anything, what would it be?”_

Her fingers tremble under the duvet. She knows now. But knowing is not enough. She isn’t able to connect the dots until she can find her way back to the only true reality she knows, the world with Pietro in it. This is her fight: Natasha and Tony have left it all to her, and she will have to find her way back, to Pietro.

She throws off the duvet and steps onto her own battlefield. The whole house is quiet. She can feel her fingers twitching; feel her body murmur against the silence of the space around her. Her face stares back at her from some of the photos, her face, and Pietro’s. Her fingers glance off the glass of one picture, then another. The memories are written on the walls, memories she’ll never forget now. She softly treads into the kitchen; the white tiles are a familiar memory. It’s still silent, and she knows there’s something in it, something close and ambiguous. She opens her mouth, whispers, “Hello?”

She hears Pietro’s answering laugh. It’s eerie. It haunts her. She turns her head in his direction, but he is not there. She can’t feel him anywhere. She does not like it. She hears a single, bloody gasp of horror in that single echo of laughter. There’s an omen in that single sound.

Her hearts forgets to beat. She hears a death sentence she does not want to hear.

She hears the wretched snapping of a heart clasped between two merciless hands.

Wanda walks toward the room it comes from, a room tucked away from the kitchen. On the other side, she will find something she does not expect, and it comes- -she opens the door wide and finds herself standing in front of Clint Barton, a child in his arms, and the ricochet of bullets she isn’t expecting-

Her eyes are wide open, and…

The breath leaves her lungs and he’s standing right in front of her, white hair, a cocky smile and wide, unafraid eyes-

And-

_“You didn’t see that coming?”_

Wanda closes her eyes. She is too late. The tears are brutal, but not as brutal as the sounds of her splintered heart.

It’s worse than dreaming of a boy who didn’t exist in that other world that was not real.

It’s worse than thinking that she was the one lost, half of a whole without a name.

She sees Pietro drop, white, blue, black and drops of scarlet red surrounding his still frame.

She knows now: she’s knows there’s a reason why she’s here, watching this.

She wasn’t there when he first fell.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In this world, Pietro finds Wanda and she is still screaming.

Their stepfather lies dead on the wooden floor, and blood streams out of his open mouth. _“I didn’t mean to-“_ Pietro knows what happened. He always knew: Wanda was too afraid to tell him. _“-he w-wouldn’t stop-“_

Pietro’s teeth click and he grabs his little twin sister in his arms and holds her as close as he possibly can.

He sees a lone gravestone and knows it isn’t hers, not in this world, because he’s her older twin brother and he won’t ever let anyone touch her again.

_“H-he said he would ki-ki-kill-“_

Wanda’s words stop and he hears her meaning and he doesn’t care because everything is a blur and he grabs anything they can use while they find their way through the darkened streets of the city.

“I’m here, Wanda,” he says. “I’m not letting you go.”

_I’m sorry I wasn’t there to protect you._

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“It’s scary, isn’t it?”

Wanda knows it’s the man who is a beast.

She stares into oblivion while Pietro’s body is taken onto the ship, glassy eyes and an open mouth.

They’re the only two left standing, here, on this floating island.

“It’s always scary, going back and seeing all this for the first time. It’s like reliving one bad dream after another.”

“I want to stop it,” she says, blinking back the tears. Her fingers crack. “How do I stop it?”

The anger and pain and confusion in her voice is mellowed by the calmness of Bruce Banner’s voice.

“Out there, in our world, you grew unstable, without him. So I'm told,” he says. She can hear the numbness, the steadiness of his voice, and she knows that the beating heart she hears is him attempting to control an angry beast inside.

She done something the beast couldn’t stop.

She’s very afraid.

“You have the power to change it all, Wanda. Just close your eyes and make it real. Believe in yourself.”

“I’ve always believed in myse-“ she says as she turns to face him. She can feel the anger thrum in her veins, but the soft look in Bruce’s eyes tells her otherwise.

She falters.

“Not without him,” he replies, gentle. “You stopped when he died.”

His voice melts into a disfigured background. He’s gone, back to where he came from.

 

 

 

 

 

/She suddenly remembers thinking there wasn’t anything to live for in the space Pietro left behind/.

 

/She also remembers the words “No more mutants”/.

 

 

 

 

 

Pietro holds Wanda in his arms and wonders when she got to be so light, so fragile, so cold.

Winter winds never cooled him: he is a creature of steady heat.

His sister is the one prone to sickness.

She curls closer to him, draws her breath at the same time he exhales.

The darkness of the cave they take shelter in is something safe, a beast that keeps heat when everything else outside, in the Russian air, is left to freeze. Wanda says nothing: her breath ghosts the dark air.

“Do you think they’ll take us away from here?” she murmurs.

_Will we be taken away from each other?_

“No,” he forcefully murmurs into her ear, grappling her slim body even closer, squeezing her until she begins to warm. She wraps her arms around his chest: he feels safe, and she feels safe, and they both sleep like that until morning.

Then they pack up, and find their way to a bus station and find themselves taken along to another place where they both play pretend for a little while longer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She is so confused. She is not sure what is real and what is fantasy. Pietro isn’t here to guide her anymore.

She looks down at the ground, feels the tarmac vibrate under her feet as the island finally hits the ground. They’ve all left her to make her choice. Her hair is floating higher and higher above her head.

It’s here, this moment.

Her breath leaves her and her eyes close, but the strength isn’t there.

She is frantic inside and feels herself splinter in twos, threes and fours.

Anger, fear, loneliness, everything, all wells up inside her.

_“-If you had the power to control anything, what would it be?”_

She doesn’t know how she does it.

She can’t control it: it’s something evil and dark inside that replaces Pietro’s cocky sweetness from the real, real world.

Her heart is screaming out for two: she feels it under her skin, hears it in her sudden scream as her knees bring her crashing down.

She sees cracked mirrors, cracked glass, a single, cracked, broken heart that was once two.

She doesn’t want this-

_**Doesn’t-** _

 

 

 

 

 

/Pietro’s voice whispering in the dark of night, arms wrapped around her as the bombs fell in some other place far, far away/.

 

 

 

 

 

 

/Pietro’s voice soothing her, holding her, carrying her when he found out about their stepfather-/

 

 

 

 

/Pietro’s hand guiding her while they both stood waiting for a bus to take them away from another Orphanage in the early morning light/.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Everyone calls us gypsies, but we aren’t,” she remembers saying to the Avengers at Pietro’s funeral. “We just never belonged anywhere we went. That’s why we were so close.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Are we going to die here?”

“No. Were going to be okay. Promise.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I’m scared, Pietro.”

“We’ll be fine. Promise. Together.”

“Always.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I want to know you better.”

A whisper: “You already do.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is on an unquiet, red morning, while they wait for the restaurant to open, that the police find them.

They are standing in an unknown street somewhere in the middle of some European country.

They do not expect it.

But God works in mysterious ways, and for a pair of gypsies like them, they have no choice but to accept their fate.

One of them had a gun.

Someone thought there was going to be a robbery.

(They were only going to ask for work in return for food).

One shot was all it took, and Pietro’s whole world shatters into a million shards of tiny glass and horrific screams.

The police jump in horror at the sounds of his cries.

 

/They secretly second-guess their choice/.

 

They take Wanda.

They leave her blood all over the ground.

He runs: she does not want him to be taken too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She uses everything she can.

 _Everything_.

She does not want this.

She does not want this.

She does not want this.

She does not want this.

She wants to go back to this- this one moment- and change everything.

She wants this to completely fade into a memory that only she remembers.

She wants Pietro to live.

She can’t breathe.

She needs Pietro-

She reaches out with fingers stretched wide, and screams as the island finally hits the sea.

Her eyes see red and she smells fire: her body burns her alive, and finally, finally, her pain is outside- outside of her small frame.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pietro finds himself standing on the very edge of a cliff looking down on a city without a name.

He wants something- someone- to die.

He howls at the sky instead; he knows that no matter how hard he tries, he would never, ever, have the courage to kill for someone already gone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

She wants Pietro.

 

 

 

 

He wants Wanda.

 

 

 

She wants her twin, her brother, her best friend, her beating, bleeding heart, her throbbing mind, her only comfort, her only family, her only everything-

 

 

 

He wants his twin, his sister, his best friend, his beating, bleedinghearthisthrobbingmindhisonlycomfor-hishishishishis-

 

 

 

 

 

_“You always remember me.”_

 

 

 

 

_“Do you want to come with me, Wanda? To another world?”_

Another world.

Another reality.

Another outcome, one where they both existed.

 

Yes.

 

She wants that.

She wants that.

She creates that.

She creates exactly that, reconfiguring the little seconds in which she lost her brother and replacing them with the bare-split second in which he escaped from a death that would never, ever be his ever again.

This is what she wants.

She can feel her body tear with the pain of it all: she should not be doing this, but the malevolent God who set Pietro’s fate knows nothing about the both of them, and she wants to see him, real, alive and breathing again.

Red.

Red.

Scarlet red for a witch who burns and sets an entire world on fire.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pietro stares out at the city, and then a man is standing right beside him, a man with blue on his uniform and a star on his chest.

“It’s okay to be afraid, without her,” he says. Pietro does not answer.

“It’s okay to be afraid,” the man says again, and Pietro hears the rumbling of his voice against the shrill, sudden cold of the world around him.

“It’s not okay,” Pietro replies.

“We were always meant to be together. Always.”

The man says nothing, not for a while.

 

And then-

 

“If it’s not okay, then don’t you think you should do something about it?” his voice falters, draws out of Pietro’s world, “This is your reality, after all.”

 

 

 

 

Clint is standing beside Wanda as she screams her way into oblivion. He kneels down and wraps both arms around her.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and-

 

 

Then.

 

 

Finally.

 

 

Black.


	3. This World (For Us).

Pietro is the first to wake up.

It’s dark inside.

The cold, winter air is nothing to his skin, but he shivers all the same. He feels as if he’s been sleeping for years, and when he looks down to the white sheets, he knows his body has grown even though his mind is still stuck in the seconds- before- when an island came falling to the ground.

“Wanda?” he whispers.

She always answers.

This time she doesn’t.

He crawls out of bed and walks to the curtained windows. He stops, falters, then draws them apart and sees white light.

 

 

 

He knows he’s in that space in-between.

It scares him a little. He wonders what she’s been doing without him.

 

 

 

_“You didn’t see that coming?”_

 

 

 

Yes.

He did see it coming, and that is why he is here, in this half-world.

“Wanda needs me,” he says, matter-of-fact. He has no right to leave the world without her.

“If Wanda needs you, then you should go, don’t you think?” Clint’s voice filters in the background.

Pietro turns, and finds Tony Stark watching him.

Tony’s eyes are bare, and there’s something raw in them that makes Pietro want to remember something he believed he could never forget.

“I always thought you were a bad person,” Pietro says instead. Tony’s eyes crinkle, and the laugh that bounces in the hollow bedroom is something that makes Pietro shudder.

“Everyone thinks I’m a bad person,” he replies. “Maybe I am.”

“But you are not,” Pietro says. Tony’s eyes blink, and they take in the twin. “You are a good person.”

Tony looks away, and Pietro takes in the shadowed grace of the frame before him.

This is Tony, the man who tried to kill them.

The man who couldn’t.

“It’s my fault that all this happened to you in the first place,” Tony says. “And for that, I, truly, am sorry. I never wanted to hurt anyone.”

“I believe you,” Pietro says.

A breath passes between them and Pietro knows that it isn’t enough for the billionaire with the face of a child without belief. But that is something for another time, something to talk about over a lit candle, in a hushed whisper, because what came before does not matter, not compared to what is happening now.

“Can you help me find my way home?” he asks. “I could do with someone who could show me my way back to my sister.”

Tony smiles. “Don’t you realize you’re already home?”

The world becomes white and Pietro feels himself click in all the right places.

 _Home._ This is what he’s been looking for this entire time.

All the other worlds, all the other Gods, had it wrong.

This is where he really belongs.

 

 

 

 

 

The heart monitor beeps.

It’s a single, hoarse sound, but it’s there and it’s real.

Tony slumps with relief, and reaches out to grasp the hand that searches for his sister’s.

He joins them together with careful ease and baited breath.

He leaves the room.

They’ve got the rest.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wanda breathes in and opens her eyes and readies herself for another sad ending. But this story, this world, will not end in tears and broken hearts and a pain that suffers in space, and that is because Pietro’s eyes are hovering over her. His voice whispers her name: it’s a hoarse, broken voice, but it’s a promise.

She feels her heart stitch itself back together.

He is cradling her face between both of his hands, and the warmth in them softens the edges of her vision.

Her breath hitches and she throws her arms around his neck, grasping him in all the same ways she tried to grasp reality in all those other realities that were not realities but nightmares.

 _“You’re home,”_ she says.

 _“You’re home,”_ he whispers into the crook of her neck.

She feels the sickening, exciting, elating, emotional wreck of one stitch after another as her chest fills with happiness and her mind fills with wonder. They found each other. They’re back where they belong. The tide of happiness overwhelms her.

This time, she lets her older twin see her cry. He cries, too.

 

 

 

 

 

It’s the only ending they could’ve ever been happy with.

 

 

 

 

 

 

*

*

*

 

 

 

 

 

Tony is watching from beyond the glass.

He breathes the first breath outside the hospital room, and finally slumps.

It took _months_ , but the end result is finally there, finally before their eyes.

“I didn’t think this was even possible,” Bruce whispers, watching them one last time, before he averts he looks back to his computer.

The entire place is set up, all white tubs and monitors and white beds and blue, blue walls.

Wanda was sent back in time to right what was wrong.

Tony watches them both one moment longer, but does not say anything other than-

“Anything’s possible.”

Bruce looks at him, sees a ghost of sadness over his friend’s face, and wonders if he still blames himself over the whole thing.

“It isn’t your fault-“

“No. It is,” Tony says, as he drums his fingers against his leg. “This one’s definitely mine.”

Bruce knows Tony never let up throughout the entire operation; the dark circles under his eyes tell him everything he needs to know, and even when he felt like giving up, he still persevered.

“You’re just tired, Tony. You should get some rest.”

“Yeah,” Tony whispers, walking out of the lab. He is tired.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When Wanda grasps Pietro for the first time, Clint is standing with his children in a field in the middle of nowhere. He looks up to a wavering sky and wonders why the sadness is an uncontrolled grief. (He never got the chance to meet the twins).

 

 

 

 

 

 

When Wanda whispers Pietro’s name for the first time, Natasha is picking up her little girl from school. It’s a snowy Tuesday in Russia and her little girl has ballet. (Natasha secretly dreams of a girl with burning red eyes and a boy dressed all in blue- the Avengers, for her, never existed).

 

 

 

 

 

 

After Pietro cries into Wanda’s shoulder, Steve’s grave whispers a laugh next to Peggy’s. It’s a beautiful, beautiful day, and all feels right in the world from their view of the peaceful graveyard. (Anthony Stark often mused over a group of superheroes that could save the world from alien invasions: Steve was the one who told him he was tinkering with the mechanic oil way too much).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In another realm, a blond-haired God speaks with his brother and clasps his shoulder. _“Did you feel that, brother?”_ Loki chuckles under his breath: the twins’s laughter from another world could be felt in the bond between brothers in spirit. _“I do. The worlds feel right, brother.”_ (Thor often considered travelling to another world. On Earth, Jane never knew him).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To anyone else, all was right with the world. To a lone billionaire, everything was painted in blues, blacks. A threat, a promise, of nothingness.


	4. Epilogue

 

 

 

Wanda is holding Pietro’s hand, and Pietro is holding hers. They watch Tony Stark with curious eyes. Unspeaking eyes. Around them, the world sways with laughing children and sunny skies. The city square in Paris on this fine day is something they never thought they’d see after all this time, together.

“No one remembers that, do they?” Pietro says. “No one remembers a thing.”

(The absence of SHEILD is like salt on an open wound).

“When I said ‘ _No more mutants_ ’-“ Wanda continues.

“You altered your own realities in order find each other,” Tony says. He’s looking at Wanda as he says this. She nods. She knows; she understands.

“After I lost Pietro, I said that,” she says. “ _No more mutants_.”

“You changed reality with one command,” Tony says. “After the island fell, you said those simple words and changed everything. SHEILD completely forgot who it once was, everyone just… disappeared off the face of the planet.”

“Except you,” Wanda says.

Tony blinks, smiles. He looks away.

“I’m not a mutant, or a hero, or anything,” he says. “How can I forget what I am not?”

“And Bruce-?” Pietro starts. A week later, the guy with the glasses and fumbling smile waved his final goodbye to them, saying something about a woman named Betty and a home to get back to.

“Bruce doesn’t remember anything other than a story about a girl and a boy who deserved every last shot at being together again,” Tony explains. “He has a family now, and the rest of the team…” Tony looks off into the distance. The square is beautiful, away from everything the Avengers once knew. “The rest of the team are happy.”

Wanda looks down at their joined hands. “The Avengers will never remember unless we change reality-“

 **“No,”** Tony says. Forceful. Threatening. “ _Don’t_ change it again.”

Wanda and Pietro look to the man who remembers what will never be real again. Tony’s unsure, his eyes crinkled in all the wrong places. Pietro sees in his mind a single tear fall, and Wanda sees a small, sobbing child.

“I think everyone’s happier now. I think everyone would prefer a life without trying to save the world,” Tony whispers.

“And you, Tony?” Pietro asks. “What do you want?”

A child is shouting for his mother to follow him. Tony can hear the babble of the world around them, the surety of something that will come again. “The both of you have powers, so I’m sure that someday soon you’ll be needed again.” He clasps his hands together. “Just, when it happens, please make sure you pick out those who deserve to fight alongside the both of you.”

Tony stands up, pulls on his glasses; the vulnerable man is gone. Pietro watches him as he finally comes to say what he’s been trying to say all along: “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” Wanda asks.

“For being who I was,” Tony replies. “For being the one who caused all this.”

“You are human, Stark,” Pietro says. The soft breeze ruffles the truth.

Tony nods, as if it is true. As if he believes it.

And then he walks away.

Wanda’s hand squeezes Pietro’s and they watch him disappear.

“Brother,” she whispers. In Pietro’s mind there is a flash of Vision’s eyes and a promise of a lurking war and the bullet wounds and the murmur, _“You know I’m twelve years older than you-“_

He smiles. “How far back do you want to go?”

Wanda smiles back. “Let us make it better than it was in the beginning.”

The world glows red in her mind, and she sees faces, moments, experiences.

She sees a thousand, million possibilities, and all of them are shared with her brother.

When she woke, the world wasn’t real.

 

 

 

 

This next one will be.

 


End file.
